Reminds me of a company I heard about in the 79s. They had an IBM
1401 from late fifties. All critical software was written in
Autocoder (essentially assembly language). IBM dropped support for
the 1401. No problem, as the 360 could hardware emulate the 1401 with
no changes. The 360 went away, replaced by the 370. The hardware
emulation also went away. By this time, the original programmer had
retired and almost nobody understood Autocoder. Original programmer
got hired for conversion work, at substantially more than he made on
the job. They saved money short term by avoiding the redevelopment,
but paid big time later for what the programmer wanted to do all along
while he was an employee.

Hey, that was funny, but I seriously do know of a company that is running DIBOL software that I wrote twenty-plus years go on a VAX (when I wrote it, it was running on a PDP-11 :-). They've got a hardware maintenance contract that they're happy with, and
they don't need much software maintenance -- the stuff does what they want it to do, and they're happy.They've looked into "modernizing", but when they asked "what would we get out of this?", the answer, basically, was "well, you'd be modern". So far,
they've decided to keep their money and stay as they are. Can they keep going forever? -- probably not, but I guess they figure they'll cross that bridge when they really come to it.

Needless to say, I've had to find other work ... ;-)

Mike Naughton
Senior Programmer/Analyst
Judd Wire, Inc.
124 Turnpike Road
Turners Falls, MA 01376
413-676-3144
Internal: x 444
mnaughton@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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